In the wake of our coverage of last month's SharePoint Conference sessions, this is the fourth in a series of posts documenting the keynotes and sessions I attended at the Microsoft "Airlift" event for Office 2010. This four-day event took place in Seattle during the first week of June, was open to participants in Microsoft's Technical Adoption Program (TAP), and in essence took the form of a mini-SharePoint Conference.
Donna Shaw and Paul Cannon presented the session on the integration of SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove) with the 2010 offering. Not surprisingly, it was announced that integration with SharePoint was the major investment with this release, and SharePoint Workspace was described as being "the desktop model of the SharePoint server." Donna also stated that, "if you're comfortable working in a SharePoint site, you should be comfortable working in a Workspace."
Feature highlights demonstrated during the session included:
- The ability to take all SharePoint content (or a designated subset thereof) offline
- Auto-sync of lists and libraries (for documents, only actual changes are synched)
- Check-in and Check-out process
- InfoPath to render list content
- Integration with the Business Connectivity Services (BCS, formerly known as the BDC)
- Windows Search integration
- Windows Explorer integration
The Sync to Computer feature allows users to create a local copy of a SharePoint site on your computer via the Workspace client, thus taking your content offline. The offline content is created with a similar look and feel as that of SharePoint, with the Ribbon, panes with lists and libraries, etc., all present and accounted for.
Version history is available in the Workspace client but, since it is stored on the server, when you are offline that history data will be unavailable. The same is also true for check-in and check-out functionality, which also relies upon a connection to the server. As a result, when in offline mode, you'll only see the most recent versions of documents. This was done so as to avoid saving the entire version histories locally to your client.
Changes made while offline are automatically marked as pending upload, which is to say, pending reconnection with the server since the process of synchronization is automated. If another user has made changes to the same document while you were working offline, once you reconnect, the automatic upload will fail by design, and messaging will appear indicating the need to refresh in order to seamlessly merge your changes prior to the automatic upload to the server.
A few other items of note from the demos: selecting Search from the launch bar searches across all SharePoint Workspaces; SharePoint permissions are respected in the Workspace client; PowerPoint and Word are the first two Office apps which are supported for the automatic merge changes functionality, and will be available in the first release; and finally, san announcement regarding mobile devices was teased.
Read our complete coverage of the Office 2010 Airlift sessions:
Posted
Nov 04 2009, 09:30 AM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.